Personal Brand Special Report: 207 insights and ideas to grow your brand and career

By day, he was one of thousands of associates at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the largest corporate law firms in the world. Outside work hours, though, he was moonlighting on Twitter as @SMB_Attorney, an anonymous account where he shared the kind of legal insight behind real multimillion-to-billion-dollar merger and acquisition deals that one wouldn’t typically find outside a law firm’s deal room. There, he was one of one.

At first, the secret account was just a hobby. Within a matter of months, though, Pacifici’s inbox was flooded with the same kinds of requests: “I have a 2, 4, 6, 8, $10 million deal: Can you help me with it?” he recalls.

Five years later, those same followers are the core clientele of SMB Law Group, Pacifici’s boutique M&A firm that’s doing hundreds of deals annually and has hit more than $1.9 billion in total deal flow since 2022.

“Lawyers are risk averse by nature,” Pacifici says. “My big law mentor had an expression: ‘The nail that sticks out is going to get pounded in.’ Basically, wear your blue or white shirt, shut up, do your work.”

Pacifici has found the opposite to be true. He attributes his success almost entirely to the personal brand that he built on Twitter/X and, later, LinkedIn. His clients seek him out not only for his expertise, but also for his candor in a profession that valorizes secrecy. “People want authenticity,” he tells me. “They want to work with a real person.”

In other words, they don’t just want a deal attorney; they want Eric Pacifici.

Today, Pacifici’s story feels less like a moon shot aspiration and more like a template for where the workplace is headed. Employees are increasingly rejecting the age-old mantra of “shut up and do your work,” and are instead deciding to wrest some power in the corporate workplace back into their own hands.

You can see it in the Google search data. In just the last year or so, Google searches for the term “personal brand” spiked massively and have continued to trend upward. “A personal brand is the new currency to survive in the present-day job market,” says Dillon St. Bernard, Gen Z social media strategy expert and founder of the creative agency Team DSB.

Over the past five months, I’ve solicited input from 66 people to learn how and why they’re building their personal brands. My colleagues Shalene Gupta and Sage Swaby interacted with another 86 people. CEOs, artists, venture capitalists, consultants, entrepreneurs, chefs, doctors, and many more—these experts shared their stories, ideas, and insights for developing, growing, and running their personal brands.

Nearly everyone agreed on one point: Opting out of the personal branding game is no longer an option. In fact, it may be the last, best way to stand out in a digital ecosystem overrun by AI content.

In this Fast Company special report, the first in a series, you’ll learn:

• How to identify your personal brand and manage it with intention
• Why personal branding is intertwined with social media—and how to find the platform where you can win
• The secrets of today’s three major personal branding strategies: the inside game, the trampoline, and the escape hatch
• What to do when your personal brand threatens the corporate one you work for

What ‘The Brand Called You’ looks like today

In 1997, when Fast Company published a cover story titled “The Brand Called You,” it canonized the concept of a “personal brand” for the first time. The author Tom Peters, who had already become synonymous with chronicling business excellence, heralded creating “the micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh” as a new way for individuals to improve their value in the economy. “To be in business today,” he wrote, “our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

At the time, as Bill Taylor, Fast Company’s cofounder, tells me, there was a sense that because companies were turning away from strict organizational hierarchies in favor of more fluid structures, employees would self-organize, gravitating toward people based on their reputation. “Back then, fundamentally, the way you expressed yourself was through an organization,” he says. Personal branding could build someone’s identity within a company, making them the colleague everyone wanted to work with, the manager with the best team, or the peer who scored the coolest projects.

Since then, personal branding has broken containment from the conference room to a wide variety of channels where one can amplify their public persona—from LinkedIn to X to social video to newsletters to podcasts to live events. Regardless of the medium, there are still employees developing brands to accelerate their career within a given organization.

Jack Corbett applied to work at NPR in 2019 as a music video intern, a position that worked primarily on the popular Tiny Desk show. In his application, he included a barrage of different links to a single example of his work: an experimental, mostly fictional documentary he had filmed in college full of grainy audio, medieval monks, stuffed polar bears, and cowboys. The video plays like a fever dream—and it got him the job.

Corbett’s knack for experimenting with funky concepts, trying new techniques, and embracing purposefully low-fidelity audio and visuals came in handy during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Tiny Desk temporarily stopped hosting concerts in the office. Corbett used that time to create an ultra low-fi explainer video for the podcast Planet Money about the stock market circuit breaker, which he filmed in front of a green bedsheet. His managers suggested that he turn the initial 3-minute cut into NPR’s first TikTok. The relatable, down-to-earth video, which now has more than 36,000 likes, set a precedent for how news organizations were allowed to show up online.

Corbett then helped Planet Money build an audience of almost 800,000 users on TikTok, amassing 90 million videos on the channel as of this writing and winning an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2023. The next year, he became Planet Money’s visual host. Because of his creative point of view and on-camera personality, Corbett’s brand has essentially come to define Planet Money’s online presence.

This is the best possible outcome for both the employee and employer. Corbett, leaning into his personal brand, went from intern to star on an important franchise, earning trust from his company to pursue his unconventional ideas. “The personal brand is a really good way of building your own power,” Corbett says. “Ultimately, people respond to individuals and creativity—that and the Duolingo bird.”

The career trampoline

Corbett’s brand lives well beyond NPR’s walls among his fans, and NPR can’t control that. For him, and everyone else, having a strong personal brand is about power.

Amid everything from job market stagnation to AI-related mass layoffs, the stark reality is that “the same rules and assumptions that got folks the American dream no longer apply,” says St. Bernard, 26, the Gen Z social media strategy expert. “We’re often forced to be ‘unicorns’ of our craft and hop from job to job to get paid what we’re worth.” But a personal brand is also, as he adds, a way “to protect yourself from the never-ending shifts across industries.”

After “The Brand Called You” took off in business culture, the idea was often associated with shameless self-promoters, so much so that Taylor, Fast Company’s cofounder, ruefully recalls one columnist proclaiming it a harbinger of “the death of Western society.” Increasingly, though, the personal brand is an insurance policy for the worst of times.

The first time that Chanele McFarlane was laid off, it was in the middle of her maternity leave. Just two years later, it happened again. “Both times, I was about four to six months into my 12-month maternity leave,” she recalls, “and was holding my baby on my lap while getting laid off via video call.”

In both instances, McFarlane, who’s a senior communications leader, knew exactly what to do. For years, she’d cultivated her brand via her blog—Do Well, Dress Well—offering professional advice to working women, which led to frequent speaking opportunities and a network of supporters. She took to her LinkedIn page, where she has just over 3,300 followers, and let her audience know that she’d been laid off.

The messages immediately started pouring in. Some followers simply wanted to wish her well, while others offered leads: Hey, I saw this job posting, thought of you. Between recruiters reaching out and opportunities forwarded to her from her audience, McFarlane found a new job in two months the first time she was laid off and in seven months the second time.

McFarlane credits this to her “personal brand trampoline,” or the idea that, when you’ve developed a brand, “no matter what happens in your career, you can propel yourself back up to better opportunities.” Because of the six to 10 hours a week that she puts into preparing for speaking engagements, attending events, and prepping posts for her LinkedIn and Substack (she migrated her blog and it’s now called Today’s Brand), she feels secure that, regardless of her employment status, she’ll always have something to fall back on.

While McFarlane’s current company supports her outside-of-work endeavors, brands like hers can sometimes be the hardest for companies to manage. Companies are attracted to the value a personal brand could bring to their own, but issues of ownership and credit can sour those relationships.

When Bob Knakal, a New York City real estate sales whiz, joined the global firm JLL in 2018, he brought three decades of experience, strong media relationships, and an established reputation as an expert voice in the field. At first, Knakal says, his employers seemed to consider his market presence a strength. But after a management change, the new marketing team, he recalls, was “company, company, company.” It “drove them up the wall” that his social reach (which has reached 220,000 followers across platforms today) significantly outpaced the company’s.

In early 2024, within a span of a few weeks, Knakal scored a CNBC segment and a feature in The New York Times. The headline: “This Real Estate Kingpin Maps Out the Path to Megadeals.” Knakal thought the story was great. “I would’ve paid a million dollars for this piece,” he says. His employers, it seems, didn’t share the sentiment.

“[It was] February 14th,” Knakal recalls. “I walk into a meeting, a guy from the executive committee is sitting there, and as soon as I walk in, the head of HR walks in right behind me. I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m getting fired.’”

That same month, though, he used his massive network as a jumping-off point to start his own firm, BKREA, which closed 43 deals worth $1.78 billion in 2025, its first full calendar year. For more on companies’ challenges in managing personal brands, why this has to change, and almost 200 insights on how to lead employees today, my colleague Shalene Gupta’s special report will debut on Monday, September 14.

From side hustle to building a business around your brand

That tension between company and employee isn’t always that dramatic, but it can exist even—perhaps especially—when your personal brand has little or nothing to do with your work.

Sammi Cohen was working full-time at Amazon when she inadvertently created her own dream job. Like the M&A lawyer Pacifici and his Twitter account, Cohen had no idea that posting her first-ever TikTok would eventually ladder up to a new career path.

In March 2022, Cohen was two years into a role in Amazon’s logistics division. The role satisfied her interest in operations, but it didn’t tap into a key interest that she’d maintained since childhood. “I’m a business nerd,” Cohen says. Specifically, “the storytelling narrative of a business is what makes me tick.” When a friend suggested that she start making TikTok videos about that passion, she balked. Me? TikTok? Yeah, right, she remembers thinking.

But the comment stuck with her. A few days later, she posted a video about Sophia Amoruso, founder of the apparel brand Nasty Gal—and immediately, something clicked. “It felt like I scratched an itch,” Cohen recalls.

Weeks later, Cohen made another video, this time about Tracy Romulus, chief communications officer at Skims, that notched hundreds of thousands of views overnight. It was clear that she’d tapped into a niche. Her background working in operations at both Aldi and Amazon, her Berkeley MBA, and her experience founding a DTC matcha brand (ultimately shuttered due to COVID) gave her a distinct authority to speak compellingly about the intersection of business and culture.

But building her brand quietly while at Amazon wasn’t easy. Cohen knew that she could never mention Amazon in her videos, despite the company’s relevance to her platform. “A lot of companies in Big Tech are—and this is something that I believe is going to have to change over time—very conscious about the narrative that’s being told about their business,” she says. “As an employee, there is an absolute line between you talking from your personal brand versus speaking on behalf of the company.”

As Cohen amassed tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok, secured brand deals, launched a newsletter, and made her own podcast, Social Currency, the potential for a problem between her day job and her burgeoning business only grew.

“I never spoke about my social media,” she tells me, “but as it evolved, it got to the point where I would have people send me Slack messages that weren’t people on my team or teams that I had worked with, saying, ‘Oh, I saw your content on TikTok or Instagram, and I looked you up on LinkedIn and I saw that you worked at Amazon, so I wanted to send you a note.’ That’s when I started to get scared, because I realized that this was really moving further beyond me.”

Within about six months, Cohen gave notice.

The next best time to start is now

There are many ways to use a personal brand. It can be a way to get ahead at work, as in Corbett’s case, or a useful “trampoline” to recover from layoffs, like for McFarlane. And as Cohen and Pacifici’s cases demonstrate, it’s increasingly possible for a personal brand to turn into a full-blown business.

That’s not to say corporate America is about to spin out into a swarm of millions of microbrands. But, as Cohen says (and again, go read Shalene’s piece on September 14), companies aren’t doing themselves any favors by shedding talent because they can’t handle a little employee self-empowerment.

At its core, a personal brand gives you unfettered access to a self-made professional community. That might look like Pacifici’s audience of small business execs hungry for M&A deal details. Or Cohen’s legion of fellow business nerds. Or even McFarlane’s small but dedicated circle of professional acquaintances. How you use your community is up to you—the important thing is that you build it.

As three separate interviewees told me, in 2026, the personal brand is not about who you know; it’s about who knows you. And, three decades later, Peters’s closing advice still rings true: “There is no one right way to create the brand called You. Except this: Start today. Or else.”

10 steps to better your personal brand

Own your brand / Find your niche / Share knowledge / Pick your platform / Balance your brand and your day job / Create career insurance / Build a company around your brand / Choose your AI comfort level / Navigate the negatives / Words to grow on

The most important thing to remember about personal branding is that it’s personal. What ultimately works for you will be distinct. As Pragya Maini, director of organization design at the management consulting firm BCG, says: “Don’t copy someone else’s brand wholesale. It’s absolutely fine, and valuable, to be inspired by leaders you admire. But inspiration is a starting point, not a destination.” That said, there’s a wealth of valuable info and advice below. Not only inspiration, but tips and frameworks to guide through everything from getting started to managing some of personal branding’s challenges. (If you want to jump ahead or choose your own adventure, click to jump to a section above.)

Additional reporting by Shalene Gupta and Sage Swaby

Own your brand

“You can try and pretend like you don’t have a personal brand, but you’ve got one whether you like it or not. You can either actively develop your personal brand or you can just let it happen. And I could not shout louder from the rooftops about how much I think this is something that everyone should be thinking about.”—Noah Greenberg, CEO, Stacker

“If you really want influence, you can’t wait to be discovered anymore.”—Charles Rogers, founder, Rogers Solutions Group; Colorectal Cancer Equity Foundation

“Early in my career at BCG, a partner asked me, ‘What do you want the client to remember you for?’—and it stopped me cold. I’d been so meticulous about developing my expertise in HR and grinding through the work that I’d never thought about it. That question flipped a switch. I didn’t set out to build a brand deliberately from day one, but I became very intentional after that moment.

“Don’t wait until you feel senior enough to start. Your brand is being shaped in small, everyday moments long before you have a big title: how you show up in a meeting, how you treat people when things are hard, whether you follow through. Those moments accumulate. The people I see building the strongest brands aren’t the ones who made a grand declaration about who they are. They’re the ones who started early, stayed consistent, and let the small things speak for themselves.”—Pragya Maini, director of organization design, BCG

“My early years out on my own as a cookbook author, YouTube personality, and, later, entrepreneur were guided by intuition rather than a desire to build a personal brand. Once my work started getting recognized, I became aware of the impact of my brand. Everything from the Japanese style cross-back aprons and oversized jumpsuits that I wore to the very bold, primary colored graphic design of my cookbooks started to become part of this identity that defined me.”—Molly Baz, chef and author, More Is More: Get Loose in the Kitchen: A Cookbook

“Although I didn’t initially intend to build a personal brand, I now consistently factor it into my content. When I was 16, I started making content on TikTok. I simply wanted to show the world my outfits. I started to realize I had built a personal brand unintentionally when followers began to ask me for advice on getting into the fashion industry and attending fashion school.

“To my delight, I have students come up to me on campus and tell me that I am the reason they came to the Fashion Institute of Technology. Leaning into this personal brand has brought me even more opportunities in the form of internships, invitations to work backstage at fashion shows, and four-figure brand deals. I try to show both those interested in the fashion industry the realities of my life while also inspiring anyone and everyone to dress ‘like a fashion student.’”—Zinia Lee, fashion student/influencer, Fashion Institute of Technology

“Your personal brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. You have no control over it unless you take control of it.”—Evan Shapiro, chaos cartographer, ESHAP

“The investment or cringe is not for everyone. I get it. But for anyone interested in generating bountiful inbounds, commanding easier ‘Yes’s,’ and becoming undefined by a corporate logo, investing in ‘You’ as an independent, full person is an invaluable long-term project. I work for myself. And I’m working to not depend upon a corporate logo as my singular source of pride, income, or identity.”—Matt Klein, founder, Zine, a think tank and publication researching cultural change (also head of consumer growth research & foresight at Reddit)

“Ten years from now, if you don’t have an established digital identity on the internet, you’ll probably have access to, at best, the bottom 10% of all opportunities available. All of the best opportunities come to us because of us being discoverable on the internet.”—Vitalii Dodonov, founder, Stan, a platform for creator-led businesses

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Find your niche

“Do an audit of what you love. I heard something recently that stuck with me: If you think back to what you were doing in your life between the ages of 13 and 16 when you were an adolescent—whatever you gravitated towards in that period of time is usually some indicator of what your natural inclinations are, what you’re passionate about, what you care about.”—Sammi Cohen, founder, Social Currency

“I get a lot of emails asking, ‘How did you get to where you are?’ So, one thing: Now I actually have a publicist. I’ve referred a number of people to Erin [Clinton Haworth]; she is amazing. You don’t have to do this all on your own. Someone who has expertise and experience can help you with this.

“I also tell them that it’s really important that the work that they’re doing is in alignment with their values. What is the work that they want to do? What are the goals that they want to have? That was part of my journey—thinking about, what is the voice that I want to have? What is the message that I want to put out? Who do I want to represent to the public? For me, it’s really important that I’m that trusted voice because I come from this experience as a woman, as a physician, as a mama. That perspective informs how I share information. So, I always ask people to think about the unique perspective that they are going to be sharing. What is that message that they’re going to be sharing with people that will make people want to listen?”—Dr. Uché Blackstock, founder and CEO, Advancing Health Equity

“You have to do a lot of internal work to understand yourself: the good, the bad, and the ugly. What boundaries will you set up? What do you hope to gain? How are you different or weird? It’s so tempting to be like everyone else, but the thing about you that made you not get an invite to sit at the cool table in school is the same reason you won’t disappear into the noise when you create. When we’re little, we’re taught to fit in, but as a personal brand, you win when you don’t. Know and embrace how you’re different.”—Christina Garnett, chief customer and communications officer (fractional), Neuemotion

“With every brand, you’ve got to distill to the essence. Ask, What’s my sentence? Ten years from now, as people look back on the work you’ve done, could they, in a sentence, distill the difference you tried to make?”—Bill Taylor, cofounder, Fast Company

“People often make the mistake of chasing whatever topic is trending. I’d rather become known for one thing than be forgettable for 20.”—Michael Kaye, director of corporate communications, Upstart

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Share knowledge

“We live in a world where it is no longer enough to simply be good at what you do. Increasingly, success is determined not only by what you know and who you know, but by who knows you. Throughout my 42-year career, I have always viewed myself as being in the information business as much as the real estate business. The platforms have changed dramatically over the years, but the objective has remained the same: provide value, educate people, and become a trusted source of information.

“After spending six years at JLL, I was fired just three days after The New York Times published a glowing full-page-and-a-quarter profile on me in its Sunday edition. While many people viewed that timing as coincidental, I viewed it differently. My personal brand had become so prominent that it was beginning to overshadow the corporate brand.

“The lesson is simple: Companies own logos, but individuals own relationships. Brands create awareness, trust creates opportunity, and consistently delivering value over long periods of time creates both.”—Bob Knakal, chairman & CEO, BKREA

“When I started building a personal brand six years ago, it wasn’t a conscious decision. Soon I realized that learning to build a personal brand and an internet audience was an unfair advantage for your career. You can ship once, publish once, post once, and reach thousands, sometimes millions, of people. That’s the definition of leverage. I call it playing the internet lottery. Publish something once, and you never know if it’ll take off and change the entire trajectory of your career.

“My personal brand has always been built on one idea: accomplishing hard things. Whether that’s landing a job at a competitive company, starting a business, or hosting events with executives and teaching other people how to do the same.

“My advice to anyone building a personal brand today is simple: Get clear on your expertise and your values, then communicate them to the world relentlessly. Tell stories. Share the times you conquered something hard. Tell people what you think is coming in the next few years and how they should position themselves for it.

“Today, my business does millions in revenue a year, almost entirely built off my personal brand. None of it would have been possible if I hadn’t started posting on LinkedIn six years ago.”—Andrew Yeung, founder, Fibe

“When you look through my oeuvre, it’s never, ‘This is how smart I am. I just won this award.’ It’s This is what I think. This is what’s going to happen. This is what’s happening. I just watched a TikTok earlier today about the death of the influencer and how it’s moved to these interesting forms of creators. One of them is the noted expert. Without knowing that’s what I was doing, that’s what I was doing. I was creating a brand for myself as a noted, provocative, foul-mouthed, hard truth-telling oracle of the shit that’s going down right now. When I got fired at Comcast and I had to decide what to do with the rest of my career, I decided, well, I’m going to take this personal brand and now I’m going to productize it.”—Evan Shapiro, chaos cartographer, ESHAP

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Pick your platform

“I watched the investors who rode the Medium wave build deal flow that punched far above their weight. After cofounding and raising a $100 million venture fund, I knew I needed to find the new version of that wave. For me, it was short-form video.

“When I started making TikToks about two years ago, there was a palpable belief that short-form content was inherently unserious. But I didn’t need video to make me serious. I needed it to help the right founders discover me. I knew Gen Z was increasingly beginning its searches on TikTok, yet almost no VCs were there. While every VC was wringing their hands and trying to dunk on one another on Twitter, TikTok gave me a place to experiment without the industry watching too closely.

“I’ve sourced roughly five investments through TikTok and Instagram. My first came through a TikTok DM that began, “I bootstrapped my last company to a $200 million acquisition, and I’m thinking about starting something new . . .”

“People assume the lead quality from social media is low. It isn’t. Serious founders are scrolling. Because my content makes my thinking visible, the right people often arrive already understanding what I believe and why I may be the right investor for them.

“The algorithm is the most powerful matching engine ever created. It can bring the right founders, investors, and collaborators to you at unprecedented scale—but only if you give it enough signal to know who your people are.

“My biggest lesson: Go where your peers aren’t. If everyone in your industry is already performing for one another on a platform, it may be a terrible place to become distinctive.”—Kate McAndrew, cofounder, Baukunst

“I pivoted to building a personal brand and a B2B creator business after 12 years of self-employment as a freelance writer because AI is changing things so quickly, and my freelance workload was drying up . . . I had a [LinkedIn] profile and had been posting there for over 15 years, but really inconsistently and not about one particular topic. This was the biggest change, as I went all in on LinkedIn and got very focused on only talking about the AI search space.

“This has made the biggest impact so far. I’m about to pass 1 million impressions in 2026 on my LinkedIn account, and that has never happened before! When I look at my previous data there, I never even cracked 100,000 impressions over the course of an entire 12-month span. This is also where most of my inbound comes—via LinkedIn DM.”—Kaleigh Moore, answer engine optimization (AEO) strategist, Kaleigh Moore

“I had this realization that all of my buyers were on LinkedIn. No matter what you’re trying to do, in 2026, probably most of your buyers are on LinkedIn. I started creating content that was at the intersection of what I thought they would be interested in and what I was interested in/passionate about. A lot of founders say, ‘Oh, I’m going to build a personal founder brand,’ but they just copy what they’ve seen, which is building in public. They don’t realize the only people who care about that are other founders. If what you want to do is build your reputation with other founders, great, but no one else cares about your fundraising experiences, etc.

“Last year, our business grew from a $3 million run rate to an $8 million run rate. I would attribute one-third of that growth to my presence on LinkedIn.”—Noah Greenberg, CEO, Stacker

“I’ve always been a big LinkedIn user, but it was really this year with a book launch that I got super, super scheduled. I post four times a week on LinkedIn, and there’s very specific days based on my goals. Tuesdays are about my company; Wednesdays are interactive; Thursdays I’m gifting some insights, usually a chart or something like that; and then Sundays are reflective, human Amanda. I have a spreadsheet where I measure the number of impressions, likes, interactions, and reshares, because I’m trying to gift something that [my followers] want to give to someone else. So that’s a measure of success for me. I track all of that, and I will actually upload that back into my ChatGPT model to say, ‘Let’s look at what’s landing.’”—Amanda Schneider, founder and president, ThinkLab

“You cannot build affinity online the way that you can build it in person. (I have always felt this way, and it was also a big part of my career at Glossier.) I do a lot of podcasts, which I find are maybe the closest comp, because if you go on a podcast and only 50 people listen to it, they know your whole story. There’s just the depth of the message that is so much faster. I don’t have TikTok, and I’m not saying I’ll never have TikTok, but there’s so many ways in which our brains are short-circuited every day. I just prefer a longer form. I haven’t fully given up on intellectualism. With a podcast or a panel, where people are actually engaging, if someone comes to a panel, there’s general interest. That’s probably a customer you want to convert.”—Melanie Masarin, founder, Ghia

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Balance your brand and your day job

“I’m a recruiter, career strategist, and content creator who built a personal brand on LinkedIn while working full-time in corporate talent acquisition. Rather than using my platform as an escape from corporate, I intentionally built it to complement my career and demonstrate my expertise publicly.

“The funny part is that creating content actually made me better at my job. I stayed on top of hiring trends because I was talking about them every day. I built relationships with professionals all over the world, and I became a better communicator because I was constantly explaining recruiting concepts in a way people could understand.

“My current company actually saw my personal brand as an advantage. They hired me to recruit, but they also asked me to teach recruitment marketing to their marketing team because of the experience I’ve gained from building my platform. That’s something I never expected when I started posting.”—Jalonni Weaver, talent acquisition consultant, National Life Group

“I’m currently in a nine-to-five corporate role while building a personal brand on LinkedIn focused on introverts. The catalyst was being told I was ‘too quiet’ throughout my life, especially in the workplace. [I remember] a manager saying during a team-building event: ‘I don’t like quiet people.’

“My content challenges some of the assumptions people have about introverts in the workplace, and I wasn’t sure how that would be received. I worried about how it might affect my job or future career opportunities. The response has actually been overwhelmingly positive. My coworkers regularly tell me they enjoy my posts and that they’ve learned something from them.”—Vanessa Rivera, associate director, regulatory advertising and promotion, Bausch Health

“Staying quiet gave the ideas [for The Human ARC Substack on AI] room to develop before they had to represent me professionally. I could test an argument, drop one that didn’t hold, and write in a voice separate from my corporate role. The work got more specific, because I was writing for the idea rather than for what performs on LinkedIn. There’s a freedom in that, one that brought me back to writing in the first place.

“The cost was reach and connection. I’d spent years building a relevant network and couldn’t use a person in it without revealing the tie between me and the publication. Every essay started from zero. I had 2,000 people who might have cared, and I couldn’t tell a single one of them it was me. I remember the day I hit 50 subscribers on Substack, and it felt like I’d reached Everest’s summit . . . minus the frozen folks.

“Staying quiet gets harder to sustain once the work needs trust, collaboration, and a visible author. Why in the world should anyone believe you have the receipts to back up your POV if you are anonymous? That’s the transition I’m in now.”—Amy C. Benner Anand, senior agentic solutions sales advisor, Microsoft

“I started my career in advertising as a personal assistant . . . getting my boss salmon for lunch, setting up mini sparkling waters in boardrooms, unclogging toilets . . . not exactly the creative work I wanted to be doing. I wanted to work in strategy and creative, so outside of work I started making TikToks about literally anything that interested me.

“I wasn’t trying to become an influencer. I was just making things. Ironically, the moment I started making my own content, the creative job offers started rolling in. Building a personal brand gave me an in to an industry that otherwise felt pretty impossible to break into.

“[Making] butter has always been my creative outlet. When I started posting about it, it didn’t feel like I was starting over. It just felt like the next chapter of the same story.

“I joined 72andSunny about a year ago, and a few months in I finally decided to stop making excuses and actually build the business because of the team I’m on.

“72andSunny has never made me feel like Butter Girl is something I need to hide. They’ve celebrated it from the beginning and trusted me to manage both. When I reached my funding goal, they literally made me a cake and surprised me with a fake meeting.

“More companies should realize that employees don’t stop being creative when they leave work. If someone is motivated enough to build something on nights and weekends, that’s probably the kind of curiosity and ambition you want on your team. Butter Girl has made me a better strategist, and my work has made Butter Girl better. The two have always made each other stronger.”—Greer Hiltabidle, owner, Butter Girl NYC [Before Labor Day weekend, Hiltabidle made a “truly unplanned and very sudden life choice.” Click here to learn what happened next and why.]

“For me, it’s always really important to connect with people. And so I do a lot of that just by sharing my experiences and stories. I got a very large Twitter following in the mid-2010s because I was sharing my experiences of the frustration of working in academic medicine. I was that voice that other people have, but maybe felt a little bit timid to put that online. I became known as that person who works in academic medicine that’s not totally happy, but she’s actually speaking out about it.

“I felt like I was totally under a microscope because I was under a microscope. That was one of the reasons that led me to leave [academia], because there were actually a few posts that I did that I thought . . . my values, my ideas may be different than folks that are leading our institutions.”—Dr. Uché Blackstock, founder and CEO, Advancing Health Equity

“Being the one that’s willing to be weird and have an opinion on something and tell people you like something is a double-edged sword. It will impress some people, and they’ll be like, ‘Wow, you really understand culture.’ At the same time, it will scare them because some have been conditioned into that type of personal brand where you actually just remove all of your personality to go to work.”—Ryan DiLazio, partner, Loudmouth

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Create career insurance

“Early on at Google, the content work (YouTube, sketches, explainer videos) started as a practical response to a real gap: Developers needed to understand a 220+ product portfolio, and there wasn’t a good way to do it. Growing that channel from roughly 250K to over a million subscribers wasn’t the goal; it was the by-product of solving that problem well and repeatedly.

“The realization that it had become a strategic asset hit me during my rapid career progression, where I was consistently promoted every 18 months from L4 to L5, L6, and L7. Because my work was highly visible and widely discussed across the organization, my leadership didn’t even need to advocate for me. Engineering and [project management] teams regularly praised its effectiveness in driving product-led growth. The ultimate confirmation, however, came when recruiters began flooding my inbox, sharing my own work back to me and asking if I would take a call to help their companies achieve the same results.”—Priyanka Vergadia, founder and CEO, The Cloud Girl; former head of North America developer relations, Google, and former senior director, AI transformation, Microsoft

“My personal brand has created an amazing business with speaking engagements, brand partnerships, courses, and digital products, but I don’t see it as something that has to replace corporate work. I love recruiting. I love talking to people. I love helping someone land a job that changes their life. You can build something alongside your career. Your job gives you stability and benefits, and your personal brand gives you options. I think that’s a really powerful combination.”—Jalonni Weaver, talent acquisition consultant, National Life Group

“Building my personal brand has always been about creating a community of like-minded people who share my values and understand the importance of amplifying progressive narratives and causes both in business and society at large. When I ultimately announced my departure from my previous employer, I received an outpouring of support from people who were there to encourage and motivate me, both in terms of providing tangible professional support in making connections, offering to make introductions, but also in terms of community support for my mental health and wellbeing, which I think is also extremely important.” —Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel, author, Cultural Intelligence for Marketers

“Having a strong and visible personal brand is an incredible insulator from layoffs; if your role gets cut, you now have a platform and a reputation to build from, and if you don’t you’re going to be competing with hundreds or even thousands of other faceless résumés. The experience on those résumés tell a part of the story, but they don’t tell an employer how you think or what your work looks like in practice—and I think that’s really important in the job market today, if not an essential part of it now. People want to know what you’re capable of. A LinkedIn profile or Substack can be a living portfolio for your work.

“When I turned to LinkedIn after getting laid off to let my network know I was effectively back on the market, the inbound came from pretty much every direction over the next few weeks. Almost everyone that reached out would reference some specific part of my work they had seen online. Even the cold connections felt a bit more like warmer leads, and the conversations flowed a lot easier as a result. If I never invested in building my own brand online it would have been a totally different outcome.”—Cody Luongo, PR and content consultant, CL Media 

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Build a company around your brand

“For the past year, I’ve been balancing my full-time job as a social content director in corporate advertising while starting my personal brand. When anyone’s asked me, ‘How do you do both?’ I always say, ‘I don’t sleep.’ The burnout is real, but there are also so many benefits of doing both. . . .

“I’ve always known I was going to have to stop one or the other, but I didn’t know exactly when that would happen. For a while, my mindset was push through, keep going, and do both until I absolutely couldn’t anymore. I was burnt out and didn’t even realize because I was on autopilot trying to be as productive as possible. Then I received a message from La Peetch, a cooking camp set in Julia Child’s summer home in Provence, France. Julia is one of my many idols. She wasn’t afraid of failure, and getting that message made me realize that I had been ‘pushing through,’ doing both because ultimately I was afraid of failure: Butter Girl not being profitable, people not caring, a ‘side hustle’ that stayed just that. My coworker Lee said, ‘Sometimes you miss the best opportunities by just pushing through.’

“So, I made a very unplanned decision that just felt like a gut feeling. Being here [in Provence], I’m more confident in what I want to do and how I want to spend my life. I’ll be back in Brooklyn in two weeks, putting 100% into my business. The quote I live by—’make it real first, make it good later’—well, I’m in the ‘make it good later’ phase, and I owe it to myself to put everything into that.”—Greer Hiltabidle, owner, Butter Girl NYC

“I was made redundant twice in 2020 while working in startup marketing roles. At that point, I began using LinkedIn more seriously to share what I was learning about growth, content, and building businesses.

“What started as a way to make myself more visible became an escape hatch from traditional employment. My personal brand helped me win clients, build a seven-figure product studio, and eventually launch Shake Content, a LinkedIn content agency focused on B2B founders and executives. Today, a significant part of our pipeline, partnerships, and credibility can be traced back to the audience and reputation my team and I built through consistently sharing our experiences publicly.”—James Farnfield, founder & CEO, Shake Content

“My personal brand is part of my long-term semiretirement plan. My goal isn’t to stop working. It’s to have more control over how I work. I’d like to leave full-time corporate, consult a few hours a week, and continue growing and monetizing my personal brand. Together, those give me the freedom to spend more time on work that feels meaningful while creating a life with more flexibility.”—Vanessa Rivera, associate director, regulatory advertising and promotion, Bausch Health

“The largest challenge was transitioning to monetizing my brand without seeming like I was selling something. I wasn’t inventing a brand from scratch. I already had a big brand reputation within the industry, but it was as a paid disrupter at corporate entities. The awkwardness in the transition is, ‘How do I convince this person to pay me for this?’ In the first days, I was cold calling clients. . . . I was shipping the product, but I couldn’t get the product on the shelves.

“Then I created this map of the media universe and I posted it on LinkedIn and then Deadline picked it up, and it just all kind of mushroomed from there into this much larger brand that I have within my segment of the universe. I’ll probably do somewhere around 50 paid public speaking engagements in the year ahead. I now have my own conference tracks.”—Evan Shapiro, chaos cartographer, ESHAP

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Choose your AI comfort level

“The things that can’t be automated—your judgment, your relationships, your unique point of view—are now the real differentiator. The value of a personal brand is only increasing. I’ve been deliberately reinvesting the time that AI saves me into exactly that: showing up at conferences, mentoring others, and being visible on topics I genuinely care about.”—Pragya Maini, director of organization design, BCG

“I actually have my ChatGPT model trained on my goals for LinkedIn. In that training is also a double-check for me, because listen, I find out I’m going on Oprah. I’m super excited about that. Guess what? I want to shout it to the world: ‘I’m going on Oprah!’ But I built this ChatGPT model to be like, ‘No, no, no, Amanda, your brand is gift-giving to the world. That’s about you. Why does that matter to your reader?’”—Amanda Schneider, founder and president, ThinkLab

“When we work with founders, doing LinkedIn ghostwriting, we definitely use AI to help pull together baseline content, but if we didn’t get the valuable insights, thoughts, and reflections the founders have, the posts end up feeling inauthentic.”—Kathrine Nicolaisen, founder & CEO, Olives & Heather

“I’ve tweeted now 10,000 times. A few weeks ago, I downloaded all of my Twitter data, and you can drop them into Claude and you can have Claude examine five years’ worth of tweets. At first, it was like, ‘I’ve digested 27%.’ I’m like, keep going. It’s like, ‘40%.’ Keep going. We’re up to 80% of the tweets. It was able to describe me in the scariest way possible and to crystallize for me what I’m trying to accomplish with my firm and with my life in a way that I’ve never been able to synthesize myself.”—Eric Pacifici, founding partner, SMB Law Group

“The idea of having ChatGPT write me a LinkedIn post makes me want to throw up.”—Noah Greenberg, CEO, Stacker

“I love AI. In the past 10 years, I’ve written over 800 articles for publications. I’ve done four books. These are things that I created on my own. That is a base of IP that, if you give [it] to AI and enable it to remix it in different ways, you can then edit it for such things as social media posts. That’s a fantastic form of efficiency.

“The question is: What is your tentpole content versus what is distribution or amplification content? That’s the distinction I would draw. If you are reliant upon AI to come up with ideas for you, that seems very dangerous.”—Dorie Clark, author, The Long Game

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Navigate the negatives

“Building a personal brand is incredibly time-consuming, especially when it’s not your full-time job.”—Aarati Cohly, founder and principal consultant, Cohly Consulting

“If you are a creator that’s building a brand, obviously you need to be talking about it and building it and being the marketing channel. But if you are someone who has 2,000 followers, you need to be maniacally focused on building that business up. I don’t necessarily think you need to be documenting that. I understand people like to see the day-to-day, but it can be a huge distraction from building the actual business. There’s this pressure that they have to do it. Then they’re doing it, they’re miserable, they take their eye off the ball in their business, and it becomes this vicious cycle.”—Jaclyn Johnson, founder and CCO, Create & Cultivate

“The negatives are being a piñata for the haters. You need a very thick skin to navigate many personal attacks.”—Dan Ives, partner and senior directing manager, Yorkville Ives & Co.

“People have talked negatively about me on an anonymous campus gossip app, but that’s a part of the job description when you’re a content creator.”—Zinia Lee, fashion student/influencer, Fashion Institute of Technology

“I spent the last 10 years growing a strong personal brand, and I regret it every day. I think it is really hurting me in the market because employers think I will be too expensive or not a ‘team player.’ . . . I also went all-in on a technology that people thought was going to be big (virtual reality) and now I really regret that, because being a leading expert on VR is the same thing as being the best typewriter repair person after the PC revolution.”—Anonymous VR developer who has worked with Fortune 500 companies

“I get pigeonholed. People associate me with the outdoors and adventure and products and gear but not much else. I am not taken as seriously in some media and journalist circles because of the topic matter that I am associated with.”—Stephen Regenold, founder, Regenold.co; founder/ former editor of the media brand GearJunkie

“The downside is the constant risk of being mistaken for only a communicator. I actively manage making sure people don’t file me under ‘content creator’ when the actual work has been go-to-market strategy, leading a team through product launches, and revenue accountability. Visibility can work against you if it overshadows the executive work underneath it so I’m deliberate about leading with the strategy and letting the storytelling be the how, not the headline.”—Priyanka Vergadia, founder, The Cloud Girl

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Words to grow on

“Do the work, become an expert at something and share that authentically; the brand follows.”—Priyanka Vergadia, founder, The Cloud Girl

“A common mistake is assuming personal brands live only digitally. How you represent yourself in person needs to be congruent with what people see online.”—Faith Chang, founder, Leadership Moxie

“If you ship value for free, the value will return to you.”—Evan Shapiro, chaos cartographer, ESHAP

“I can credit at least a third of any money I’ve made in my career to showing up online. That’s lower than what I imagine it’ll be as I expand. The true value of building a personal brand is its ability to open doors, build trust, and create opportunities that you would never be able to apply to.”—Dillon St. Bernard, founder, Team DSB

“Treat your personal brand as a living thing, not a one-time exercise. Your brand should evolve as you grow.”—Pragya Maini, director of organization design, BCG

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